Hon Deputy Chair, the questions asked is: What are the successes of Black Economic Empowerment, BEE, in respect of unemployment and inequality? I will start by saying that BEE contributes to our employment and equity goals in at least four different ways. The first one is, through elements of BEE that drives employment and decreasing inequality like skills development. People often conflate BEE just with ownership. Ownership is there, but it has a number of other elements and skills development is one area that companies have to contribute to in order to get a score in the BEE score card.
It is something that every hon member here will agree on that skills development leads to employment gains and decreasing inequality. Another example of this enterprise development is that, you get a better BEE score if you support smaller businesses like small, medium and micro- sized enterprises, SMMEs, and that grows the economy, that grows the number of jobs and the number of economic opportunities. The second way in which BEE contributes to our goals is by expanding the pool of enterprise and talent in South Africa. Think about it.
If 20% of the population generates all the managers, technicians and all the engineers, which economy can never grow very fast, but if a pool of 100% of the population begins to contribute to the talent pool, then that economy will grow much faster. So, what BEE does, it helps to promote a more diverse management core in the corporate world, and so you have many talented black South Africans that previously may not have had any opportunity to bring that talent into the economy who today can contribute, and it also expands a number of entrepreneurs in the economy.
The third way in which BEE supports our goals is through promoting social and political stability by the visible transformation of the boardroom and all the other, let's call it the high points of the economy. When an investor looks at the country, and it wants to do a long-term investment, something that will be a considerable sum of money, and it will take eight or nine years before a real return, they look at whether that economy is capable of being stable, and is it going to have a violent overthrow of the prevailing order?
One of the things that they are influenced by is, whether the population broadly feels that the policies being pursued are inclusive policies. That is why we find now that more and more governments across the world, not just in South Africa, are talking
about inclusive growth. So, by promoting social and political stability, we in fact enhance the growth, dividend, the employment and equality dividend.
The final example I want to give is that, some of our BEE programmes imposes conditionality on companies. I want to give the example of the Competition Act that has a section that puts public interest conditions on certain measures. In the case of Coca-Cola for an example, when Coca-Cola decided to combine three major bottling operations, they had 5800 workers. As part of the conditions that were imposed on them as part of that transaction, they needed to maintain an aggregate number of jobs, 5800 jobs for a number of years. So, it supports employment.
In the case of AB InBev, they had to actually increase employment by supporting small-scale farmers, creating 2600 additional jobs. So, you could see that in some ways as variations of Broader Economic Empowerment Policy, not every intervention works, and that's why as the state we need to be humble enough to know where the mistake has been made in order to correct it.
Also, we must be bold enough to know that when something works, we need to scale it up by doing more of it and ensure that young people
in particular, can get access on it in large numbers because, bringing young people into the economy, even though it is an empowerment objective, it's also a critical way of energising the economy. Thank you.